Wednesday, 22 March 2017

I know it's become a trend lately, in some RPGs in certain quarters, to have a system where the GM never gets to roll the dice, and only the players roll for everything.

Now, in some cases, we could say that there may be nefarious motivations for this, based on a longstanding distrust certain groups have toward GMs in general; there's been for a long time a line of thought among certain gamers that the GM should be if at all possible 'deposed' from "power"; and if that's a motive then forbidding the GM from rolling dice is a particularly egregious case of anti-GM paranoia; it presumes that the GM will "cheat" on his rolls and thus abuse the players.

But let's ignore that for a moment. Let's assume that these games have no anti-GM bias going and their motivation for making all rolls the responsibility of the players is some kind of attempt instead to make the game somehow more 'fun' for the players. If that's the case, this mechanic is still really bad design.

It misses the point, you see, of the fundamental purpose of the RPG: to Immerse in a character you play in an emulated world.

It would seem the people who push forth this notion of taking the dice away from the GM never really got that point. A lot of them are some of the same people who were at one time trying to equate Immersion with either Fraud or Mental Illness, so go figure.

But for most gamers, as fun as rolling dice can be, the real epic moment is that instant where you are totally immersed in the game, where you are just your character, and almost forget you're playing a game. Where it feels real.

Any time that you are suddenly interrupted and told "roll the dice" is a moment that snaps you out of that state, at least a tiny bit. It interrupts immersion.

There's a reason why players of games like Amber, Lords of Olympus, or Lords of Gossamer and Shadow, end up talking to everyone who'll listen (and some who don't care to) about these intense roleplaying experiences, campaigns full of epic character development and close personal attachment to the game: it's because in these games, the rules almost disappear for the player. You just know your strengths and weaknesses, and you just play your guy. You don't have to fiddle with points, you don't have to interrupt what you're describing to roll the dice.

If anything, if the point is to get the best possible roleplay experience, the exact OPPOSITE of what the anti-GM crowd are suggesting is the ideal scenario: the GM should roll all the dice.

That's a theoretical, of course. There are plenty of players for whom the rolling of dice is part of the fun, even if it's not the central aspect of RPG play. And there's a reason why the formula that's worked so well all these decades is one where both GM and players roll dice at particular times and to varying degrees. But really, of the various options (no dice, GM rolls all, Players and GM both roll, only players roll), the least useful for developing roleplay and immersion is the scenario where all the dice-rolling responsibility falls on the players.

15 comments:

Is this a troll article, or do you just make this crap up. What on earth does rolling dice have to do with immersion, or story, or bias or anything. If it is a GM-diceless-system then it is just a system. Story and immersion come from the people, the story and the plot. I really enjoy AWE, as a GM I find it frees me from the intrusion of rolling dice and trying to justify a stupid radical random result. And as I am creatively making stuff up in response to the players actions, I find it reflects the game play much more immediately and intimately.

Thre's no difference in therms of immersion between "players and GM roll dice" and "only players roll dice". If you want optimal immersion, quit playing rpgs and join an amateur theatre troupe or something. Rpgs are tabletop games, not improv.The Pundit is against it because people wanting to change anything about rpgs must obviously be part of a storygamey plot (or is it Feminist ?) and he ends up sounding like a White Wolf cultist.

I agree. No matter how much fun it can be to roll dice, it snaps you right out of the game world. It's why the last Marvel super hero game was so awful: the entire game is about choosing dice, justifying rolling dice, discarding dice, comparing dice, etc. in the place of playing a role. And yet they tried to pretend it's somehow immersive in a comic book world.

When I played as a wee lad, we never got to touch the dice after initial character roll-up. We never really knew our "stats", nor the mechanics behind the game. It just flowed. Anything seemed possible because we had no idea what the DM had pre-determined and what was a game mechanic. Furthermore, a "magic sword" was just magic if you had no idea if it hit 5% more often or only on Tuesdays.

In the show Community they played AD&D in two episodes. In those episodes the DM rolled all the die, players never touched them. Apparently that was some kind of variant of the rules I'd never heard of? Anyway that would seem to help immersion far more than never having the DM touch the die.

For years I toyed with having the PCs not know their precise HP. Having the PCs not roll any dice is an experiment I'd like to try. In fact, have their character sheets be more like a description of their character and their abilities with no game mechanics.Now, it'd be heavy lifting for the GM, but it would be more immersive to the player to never have to calculate a THACO or worry about damage bonuses, the DM knows all of that and factors it in. The players would have to have a LOT of trust in their DM, though...

The most popular system is something called Apocalypse World or Apocalypse World Engine. It must be free to use those rules and advertise your game as ________ World because RPG designers do it all the time.

The new Star Wars game by FFG is like this, we played it a bit. The players make a dice pool for each roll with positive dice representing attributes and skills and negative dice representing difficulty and obstacles. They roll all the dice, compare the results, and get an outcome. The DM doesn't roll or set target numbers aside from the difficulty dice in the pool.

We played for many years where I as a DM rolled D20s and percentiles for success, and the players rolled nothing but damage. It was fantastic. I cannot imagine the shoe being on the other foot, but it would certainly allow me as a DM to focus less on number-crunching and more on running the adventure, telling the story and making shit up on the fly.